Here is a volume that is as big and as varied as the nation it portrays. With over 1,400 entries written by some 900 historians and other scholars, it illuminates not only America's political, diplomatic, and military history, but also social, cultural, and intellectual trends; science, technology, and medicine; the arts; and religion.
Here are the familiar political heroes, from George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, to Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. But here, too, are scientists, writers, radicals, sports figures, and religious leaders, with incisive...

Shows that both rural and urban communities in Sweden, Holland, England, and other countries were far more violent during the late Middle Ages. This book also challenges a number of other historical-sociological theories, among them that contemporary organized crime is new, and addresses debate about the meaning and usefulness of crime statistics.

Murder in New York City dramatically expands what we know about urban homicide, and challenges some of the things we think we know. Eric Monkkonen's unprecedented investigation covers two centuries of murder in America's biggest city, combining newly assembled statistical evidence with many other documentary sources to tease out the story behind the figures.

As we generally believe, the last part of the twentieth century was unusually violent, but there have been other high-violence eras as well: the late 1920s and the mid-nineteenth century, the latter because the absence of...

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the social history of crime an-long a variety of disciplines. This book examines the rapid spread of uniformed police forces throughout late nineteenth-century urban America. It suggests that, initially, the new kind of police in industrial cities served primarily as agents of class control, dispensing and administering welfare services as an unintentioned consequence of their uniformed presence on the streets. This narrowed role hampered their ability to control crime, and, as modern social services developed and the police came increasingly...

This work is a study of the role of local fiscal policies and fiscal politics in late 19th- and early 20th-century America. Using case materials drawn largely from Illinois, it focuses on decisions made by city governments to raise money through the sale or guarantee of bond issues on behalf of a variety of private and public enterprises from rail lines to water plants. This was part of a development strategy designed to attract population growth and capital investment. The study also examines the frequent pattern of debt repudiation, when projects went sour, and local administrations changed...

Vigorous historical exploration has increased across the social sciences in the past two decades. Originally published as a series of articles in the journal "Social Science History," the essays in this volume provide a guide to historical social science by surveying the use of historical data and methodologies in anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and geography.
Each essay in "Engaging the Past" pays close attention to the unique problems and methods associated with its particular social scientific discipline. By exploring questions raised by both contemporary and more...

Vigorous historical exploration has increased across the social sciences in the past two decades. Originally published as a series of articles in the journal "Social Science History," the essays in this volume provide a guide to historical social science by surveying the use of historical data and methodologies in anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and geography.
Each essay in "Engaging the Past" pays close attention to the unique problems and methods associated with its particular social scientific discipline. By exploring questions raised by both contemporary and more...